Stars gather as 'King's Speech' eyes Oscars crown

HOLLYWOOD (AFP) – British royal drama "The King's Speech" got another boost on the eve of what supporters hope will be its Oscars coronation Sunday, as stars gather for the climax of Tinsel Town's annual awards season.

The movie, nominated for 12 Academy Awards including best picture and best actor for Colin Firth, won best foreign film at the Spirit independent movie awards, barely 24 hours before the main Hollywood show.

Ballet thriller "Black Swan," nominated for five Oscars, won best film at the Spirits as well as best actress for Natalie Portman -- who is frontrunner in that category on Sunday.

With less than 24 hours to go before the annual awards mega-bash, stars were fine-tuning their acceptance speeches -- fingers crossed -- and preparing to don their gowns and tuxedos for the Oscars red carpet.

While "The King's Speech" is the frontrunner, no one is taking anything for granted as rivals including Facebook movie "The Social Network," classic Western remake "True Grit" and boxing movie "The Fighter" vie for Oscars glory.

That said, Firth is considered all but certain to be named best actor for his portrayal of Britain's King George VI, helped by Australian voice coach Lionel Logue -- played by Geoffrey Rush -- to overcome his crippling stammer.

David Fincher could well be named best director for "The Social Network," which tells the story of how Mark Zuckerberg created the game-changing website from a controversial start while a Harvard student, some critics say.

"The Social Network" started the awards season as favorite, taking four Golden Globes in January. But the British royal film has since swept up a series of prizes, in the US as well as at Britain's BAFTAs.

`Black Swan' wins top honor at indie Spirit Awards

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – The ballet thriller "Black Swan" won four prizes Saturday at the Spirit Awards honoring independent film, including best picture, best actress for Natalie Portman and director for Darren Aronofsky.

James Franco was picked as best actor for the survival story "127 hours," while the Ozarks crime story "Winter's Bone" earned both supporting-acting prizes, for John Hawkes and Dale Dickey.

All three films are up for best picture at Sunday's Academy Awards, where Portman is considered the favorite to win the best-actress Oscar and Franco is a co-host alongside actress Anne Hathaway.

With plenty of overlap among nominees at the Oscars, the Spirit Awards are a warm-up for Hollywood's biggest party.

The British monarchy saga "The King's Speech," the best-picture front-runner at the Oscars, won the prize for best foreign film.

"Black Swan" also took the cinematography award for Matthew Libatique.

Portman and Aronofsky joked about the difficulty in getting "Black Swan" off the ground, with cash tight and few people believing the film could ever make its money back.

"My ballet teachers were, like, every day, `So when do we get paid?'" said Portman, who won for her role as a ballerina losing her grip on reality.

`Last Airbender' rules Razzies as worst picture

LOS ANGELES – The action fantasy "The Last Airbender" — about people who can command fire, air, water and earth — now controls something else: the Razzie awards for Hollywood's worst film achievements of 2010.

"The Last Airbender" led Saturday's Razzies with five awards, among them worst picture, worst director and worst screenplay for M. Night Shyamalan.

The movie also received Razzies for worst supporting actor (Jackson Rathbone, who was cited for both "The Last Airbender" and "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse") and for a special award, worst eye-gouging misuse of 3-D.

A spoof of the Academy Awards, the Razzies were announced the night before the Oscars, Hollywood's biggest party.

"Sex and the City 2" took three Razzies, including worst actress, a prize shared by co-stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon, worst screen couple or ensemble for its entire cast, and worst prequel, remake, rip-off or sequel.

Ashton Kutcher was picked as worst actor for "Killers" and "Valentine's Day," while Jessica Alba took the Razzie as worst supporting actress for four 2010 releases, "The Killer Inside Me," "Little Fockers," "Machete" and "Valentine's Day."

Shyamalan has been on a downward spiral since 1999 Oscar best-picture contender "The Sixth Sense," which earned him directing and writing nominations at Hollywood's highest honors. He won Razzies as worst director and worst supporting actor for his 2006 fantasy flop "Lady in the Water."

Despite terrible reviews, "The Last Airbender" managed to find a decent audience, pulling in $300 million worldwide at the box office. Shyamalan adapted the movie from the animated TV series "Avatar: The Last Airbender."

More in Entertainment
The New Royals: Insight on Prince William & Kate Middleton's wedding
Full coverage of the royal wedding on Yahoo! News
Complete entertainment coverage"He managed to take a cartoon property and make it even less lifelike by making it with real actors," said Razzies founder John Wilson. "Most people who like the show, and this would include my 14-year-old son, hated the movie. It made no sense whatsoever."

"The Last Airbender" was among movies that critics knocked for smudgy, blurry 3-D images. The movie was shot in 2-D and converted to digital 3-D to cash in on the extra few dollars theaters charge for 3-D screenings.

"They call it converted. We call it perverted," Wilson said. "The more times you trick the public and charge them that fee and don't really deliver, eventually it's going to be like Lucy and Charlie Brown with the football. Fool me ten times, I'm done."

Wilson said the characters of "Sex and the City 2" were getting too old to cavort the way they do, calling the movie "`The Expendables,' but with estrogen," referring to Sylvester Stallone's tale about aging action heroes.

"Sex and the City 2" also was offensive, Wilson said, showing Parker and her gal pal co-stars disrespecting Arab culture on a trip to Abu Dhabi and flaunting their privileged ways.

"It was released in the middle of a period of American history when everyone's scrounging not to lose their homes, and these women are riding around in Rolls-Royces, buying expensive shoes and just throwing money around like they're drunk," Wilson said.

The King's Speech: The making of a very British smash hit

The King's Speech has captured the imagination of cinema audiences around the world. But it almost never happened. Here, its key players reveal the story behind a movie phenomenon 'I actually used my voice very badly for a while,' said Colin Firth who plays King George VI

The King’s Speech has swept all before it to become a critically acclaimed, worldwide box-office success. The story of an unconventional Australian therapist, Lionel Logue, who teaches the painfully shy King George VI to overcome a crippling speech impediment and lead his country into World War II, has been nominated for 14 Baftas and 12 Oscars.

With exclusive interviews with lead star Colin Firth, the producers and back-room staff, together with candid onset photography and the set designer’s beautifully detailed paintings, Live lets the movie team speak for itself about the making of the film of the year.

The story began in April 2008, when, soon after British producer Iain Canning set up new film company See-Saw Films, a play by writer (and childhood stammerer) David Seidler arrived in his office. It had been sent to him by valued contact and Bedlam Productions chief Gareth Unwin; he had a hunch that it could be adapted for the screen. Canning agreed on a joint production – and that Colin Firth was perfect to play the Duke of York.

In August 2009, with director Tom Hooper and a cast also now including Helena Bonham Carter, the team looked for funding – but the timing, just after the financial crisis, could hardly have been worse...

Woody Allen movie to open Cannes Film Festival

Director Woody Allen's new romantic comedy Midnight in Paris is to open the Cannes Film Festival in May, organisers have announced.

Shot in the French capital last year, it features a cameo from France's first lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

Festival director Thierry Fremaux called the movie "a wonderful love letter to Paris".

US actor Robert De Niro will chair the jury at the event, which runs from 11 to 22 May in the south of France.

The international cast of Midnight in Paris includes Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates and France's Marion Cotillard.

According to Cannes organisers, it will open in French cinemas on the same day it is screened at the festival so "audiences can experience live the entire programme of the opening night".

"It's a film in which Woody Allen takes a deeper look at the issues raised in his last films - our relationship with history, art, pleasure and life," Mr Fremaux continued.

The director's previous work, the London-based You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, screened out of competition at last year's festival.

Sanctum

The Avatar director is merely executive ­producer of this ­cliched underground adventure, drably directed by Australian Alister Grierson.

Never have I seen 3D used so poorly. There are no breathtaking panoramas, and most of the film is shot in near-darkness.

A gruff old potholer (Richard Roxburgh), his stroppy son (Rhys Wakefield, pictured), a cocky capitalist (Ioan Gruffudd) and various ­disposable members of the cast are marooned deep beneath the earth’s crust when a cyclone hits, blocking their exit. The only way to go is down.

That goes for the script and performances, too, making Sanctum reminiscent of The Cave, a forgettable film of 2005 in which second-rate actors fell, drowned or killed each other one by one, until the least ­annoying one was left.

This follows exactly the same format, but by the end it may be you who are screaming to be let out of the dark.

The Fighter

The Fighter is two movies for the price of one. The first is a real-life Rocky, as lovable lug Micky Ward (Mark ­Wahlberg) starts out as a ­dim-­witted loser but becomes a champ thanks to his ­marginally brighter ­girlfriend — that’s the usually sweet Amy Adams, ­valiantly playing against type as a foul-mouthed working-class barmaid with tattoos and denim hot pants.

It’s also a shouty, working-class family drama — think ­EastEnders, with more smoking, gallons of hair lacquer and enough ­leopard-skin on the women to clothe a tribe of Zulu warriors.

In order for Micky to triumph as an individual in the ring, he first has to take on his spectacularly dysfunctional family outside it — notably seven tough sisters, all seemingly unmarried, jobless and spoiling for a fight, his ­ferocious manager-mother (Melissa Leo) and his unreliable trainer-brother Dicky (Christian Bale).

Of these characters, the most colourful is Dicky, a one-time championship contender who sent Sugar Ray Leonard to the canvas and became a local legend.

Unfortunately, failure has gone to his head and he’s become an emaciated, wild-eyed ­crack addict who’s not much use to himself, let alone his brother.

Dicky’s being followed around by a camera crew, who he thinks are interested in him because he’s planning a ­comeback but actually want to record the decline and fall of a drug addict.

Bale steals the movie with a mesmerisingly goofy ­performance. It could easily be dismissed as a brazen attempt to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, except that we get a glimpse of the real Dicky during the end credits, and he’s just as much of a show-off.

Rabbit Hole

The performance of the week turns out to be in Rabbit Hole, a gruelling, wordy drama about a couple (Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman) ­suffering after the accidental death of their four-year-old son.

Sensitively directed by John Cameron Mitchell, it looks like an opened-out stage play, and it is. Although it’s sad, it avoids ­miserabilism, because it is leavened by touches of humour and a refusal to wallow. The reason to see it is Kidman. She’s wonderfully transparent, subtle and honest. This is an astonishing performance, rightly Oscar-nominated.

But though the play won a Pulitzer prize, the film will ­struggle to find an audience.

Harry Potter franchise to get outstanding Bafta award

The Harry Potter films will receive an outstanding British contribution to cinema prize at this year's Bafta awards, organisers have announced.

Potter author JK Rowling and producer David Heyman will receive the award on behalf of the franchise.

The films have "highlighted the expertise within the British craft and technical industries", Bafta said

The 2011 Bafta Film Awards will be held at London's Royal Opera House on 13 February.

Starting in 2001 with Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the seven films released so far have made more than $5.4 billion worldwide.

An eighth and final instalment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, will be released in July.

Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, 21, said he had "loved every minute of making these films".

"To me the real heroes are the crew and the huge team of craftsmen that have made all eight of them possible," he went on.

"This award is a testament to their incredible work."

Radcliffe's sentiments were echoed by co-star Emma Watson, who said it was "a huge honour".

"Thank you so much Bafta for this amazing award," added Rupert Grint, who plays Ron Weasley opposite Radcliffe's Harry and Watson's Hermione Granger.

To date, the Potter movies have received seven Oscar nominations and 28 Bafta nominations.